The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow Ė which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

The latest peak oil news is simply astounding: a whistleblower inside the International Energy Agency (IEA) claiming that ďthe US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.Ē

The fact that this report appeared in the Guardian, which has published questionable articles on peak oil, is suggestive.[...]The real story is that despite a lot of government obstacles, which postpone oil production to the future, we are running into oil, not running out of oil. The hydrocarbon age in a physical sense is still young.

Uppsala University in Sweden today published a scathing assessment of the IEA's annual World Energy Outlook, saying some assumptions drastically underplayed the scale of future oil shortages.

Kjell Aleklett, professor of physics at Uppsala and co-author of a new report "The Peak of the Oil Age", claims oil production is more likely to be 75m barrels a day by 2030 than the "unrealistic" 105m used by the IEA in its recently published World Energy Outlook 2009. The academic, who runs a Global Energy unit at Uppsala, described the IEA's report as a "political document" developed for consuming countries with a vested interest in low prices.[...]Aleklett, whose latest work was funded by the state-owned Swedish Energy Agency, said he had experience of similar internal worries about the IEA.

"The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) gave me the task of writing the report, Peak Oil and the Evolving Strategies of Oil Importing and Exporting Countries. This report was one of those discussed at a round-table meeting that was held in the IEA's conference room in Paris. At that opportunity, in November 2007, I had a number of private conversations with officers of the IEA. The revelations now reported in the Guardian were revealed to me then under the promise that I not name the source. I had earlier heard the same thing from another officer from Norway who, at the time he spoke of the pressure being applied by the USA, was working for the IEA."

The energy agency dismissed the suggestions of political influence on its analysis as "groundless". It said the annual document was reviewed by 200 different and independent experts.

The IEA purchased this book [ed: boek "The Coming Oil Crisis" 1997] and contacted me, sending an analyst to spend a week going through the data. It was evident that the team within the IEA working on the subject was fully convinced and saw its importance. They then produced a report for the G8 Ministers, meeting in Moscow (International Energy Agency, 1998, World Energy Prospects to 2020; Report to G8 Energy Ministers, March 31 www.iea.org/g8/world/oilsup.htm). The text was bland enough but it contained a critical table showing that oil demand would outpace supply by 2010, save for the entry of an item called Unidentified Unconventional, whose supply was shown to meet as much as 20% of the worldís needs by 2020. Having managed to get it past the G8 Ministers, the IEA team was able to include it in the World Energy Outlook for 1998.

In effect, the Unidentified Unconventional was a coded message for shortage. I explained this to a journalist who contacted the element within the IEA which was pleased that this important hidden message should get out. But when it was published (Fleming D., 1999, The next oil shock? Prospect April), the IEA evidently got into serious trouble with its masters in the OECD governments, and in the next issue of the World Energy Outlook, the Unidentified Unconventional became Conventional Non-OPEC, without comment or explanation.

The primary function of the IEA was to supervise OECD strategic stocks, which in turn were perceived to be a certain defence against any excessive demands by OPEC. So the IEA came to see its role as protecting consumersí interests, and it therefore had every reason to downplay any notion of depletion and finite limits imposed by Nature, because indirectly such would strengthen the hand of OPEC.